OK, apparently the impeachment didn't have as much popular support/impact as I thought.

My impression is that Clinton played for different target demographics in 2016 than in 2008, and that that didn't go over well. But I can't find polls for the 2008 Democratic primary with demographic breakdowns, so w/e.

I like those rants. Also the one with Tengri and star-childs and Newt Gingrich. Not really the political ones.

_________________ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!kårroť

what "rant". newt gingrich IS a space alien. how DARE you defame the immortal science of EDENISM, you fucking MELON

[edit: it has come to my attention that koanic's blog has disappeared. rip in peace, o great scientist of thal supremacy. let us all chant the sumerian nam-shub of race war against the filthy cromags. bork bork bork!]

Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pmPosts: 3197Location: One of the dark places of the world

An update for anyone puzzled by the latest Issue of the Day. i.e. What on earth is "Windrush"?

What was the Windrush?

The Empire Windrush was originally a German cruise ship, captured by the British and renamed - each captured ship got the name "Empire" and the name of a British river. In this case, the Windrush, a minor tributary of the Thames. The Windrush was used as a transport ship, and in 1948 it was sent to Jamaica to pick up invalid soldiers and sailors recuperating there and bring them back home to the UK. However, there were far fewer such people than expected, and the operator of the ship thought he'd make a few quid by filling his empty berths with civilians - he could offer them cheap fares because he had to go to the UK anyway. Thus, on the 22 June (Windrush Day), the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury (the old port outside London, where Elizabeth I addressed her troops before the Spanish Armada), with just under 500 passengers.

What does the Windrush represent?

In 1948, Britain was in a bad way. Economic capacity and labour force depleted by WWII, Britain was stabbed in the back and thrown into an economic crisis by the opportunism of the USA, and was struggling to recover. In particular, it was believed that the country desparately needed manpower to replace those lost in the war, and as a result laws were passed effectively opening up the country to immigration. From 1948 onward, all citzens of the Commonwealth had the right to settle indefinitely in the UK; this right was limited in 1962, and further in 1968 (the year of the Rivers of Blood speech), before effectively being abolished in 1971. The Windrush was the first major transport ship to dock after the implementation of the new rules, and has therefore come to symbolise the 'Windrush Generation': the era of mass migration between 1948 and 1962, or more broadly up until 1971.

The largest share of migrants came from the Subcontinent, and there were also many who came from Africa, particular those of Asian ethnicity who were being expelled from nations across Africa under Africanisation policies. However, the Windrush Generation is most closely associated with the origin of the Windrush passengers themselves: Jamaica, and more broadly the Caribbean. Mass migration from India had been occuring for decades if not centuries, but the 500-odd passengers of the Windrush were the first notable incident of mass migration of black people to the UK.

The Windrush and the Windrush Generation are thus strongly associated with multiculturalism and the history of the black british community, and further represent the UK's continuing close ties with its former colonies in the Caribbean. Regarding the people themselves, they are seen almost as pioneers, bravely crossing the ocean to forge a new life here.

So why are the Windrush in the news now?

Brexit. Or, more generally, nationalism. See, for years and years, the Tories, terrified of challenges from the BNP, UKIP, and other forces to their right, have been promising to dramatically reduce immigration. The headline has been to reduce immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. They've been promising it for a decade, and have never delivered.

Why? Because it's bloody difficult. Immigrants basically fall into three categories: people from the EU, who we could not prevent from coming; students, who we dare not prevent from coming because our higher education system relies on charging overseas students excessive fees; and highly-skilled businessmen with jobs, who the government dare not prevent from coming because the City would crucify them if they did. So the government cannot reduce immigration numbers (plus it would tank the economy if they did, but nobody cares about that). All they can do is increasingly robustly mop up the small number of people who don't fall into those three untouchable categories. That means more and more draconian, American-style enforcement: requiring people to have papers; abducting people from interviews that they've set up with the Home Office to ask how they can get papers, etc.

And Brexit has been worrying some people in this regard. See, there are millions of EU citizens in the UK, and theoretically we are going to safeguard their right to remain (so long as they've been here a certain length of time). But you don't need papers to get into the UK as an EU citizen at the moment. So how will we work out who has a right to be here?

A question journalists have answered by working out what the existing system is, so that we can see how it might have to be changed to deal with Brexit. And the result of looking at the existing system is: oh shit.

See, it turns out that the real targets of that draconian enforcement have not been shady Iraqis and malingering Turks. Instead, it's been the Noble and Iconic Windrush Generation - who are by now sympathetic old pensioners. They've lost their pensions. They been kicked out of their jobs. They've been refused medical treatment (and because everyone gets medical treatment free through the NHS, few but the rish have private healthcare to turn to). They've lost their homes. Because you can't get stuff if you don't have Papers. Thems the rules (because this will encourage self-deportation). Theresa May even wanted to prevent their kids from being educated. These measures have progressed step by step, but the big change was apparently in 2016 - and we've all been so consumed by the various hysterias of the moment that nobody's really noticed any of this until now.

We also don't know if anyone's actually been deported yet. At least one person, the government managed to get her as far as Heathow Airport before some lawyers rescued her. Whether anyone's gotten further than that, we don't know - this is, after all, generally not a well-connected and wealthy community.

What the hell? Why don't they have Papers!?

Well, there are a series of problems. First, the onus is on the individual to actively prove their right to remain. Because the right to remain is negated by spending too much time abroad, you have to prove continuity of residence. Specifically, for every year since 1948 (or whenever they arrived), they have to provide four independent documents showing residence. Now, can YOU provide your dental checkup records from 1973, at short notice? Or your school attendance records from 1956?

(good news - this process will be streamlined for EU citizens, because they're white, and therefore they're important. Or, more cynically, because we don't want to piss of their governments. Whereas the Windrush generation, this IS their country, so there's no-one to piss off)

Now you might say - but wait! Surely if they've been here all this time, paying taxes, the government has a record of taxes paid? Well yes. And they have records of school enrollment, and of numerous other interactions with the state over the years. But those can't be released to the public. It's important that the government doesn't spend its valuable time and money helping Nefarious Fuzzywuzzies and Suspicious Arabs wriggle their unjust way into citizenship, so it's up to the individual to prove their right to remain. After all, surely they'd take the effort if they wanted to? If they're lazy enough not to have kept their school attendence records neatly filed for sixty years in case they might be needed one day, are they really the sort of people we want to let into the country?

But that's actually not the worst of the problems.

See, in 1948, people living in the commonwealth became citizens of the commonwealth, which meant they could be citizens here. Much like EU citizens decades later, that meant they didn't need visas or the like. It meant they just had to show their passport and they were allowed in, and the deal was that we wouldn't kick them out. So they never had to actually apply to stay here, so there are no records of them applying to stay here. So even if you can prove you've been here since 1948, how can you prove that you entered legally in 1948, and not before, and not from the wrong place?

Well at the very least you could use your passport to at least show you're from the right country. Except you can't. Because back then, wives and children were included in the passport of the head of the household, and didn't have passports of their own. So a generation of people never actually had passports and can't prove their identity, let alone their arrival.

But wait? Surely SOME record was made of who was arriving, you may be asking? Well yes, sure. The British Empire had many faults, but a lack of proper filing was rarely one of them. Every ship that docked, diligent bureaucrats were on hand interviewing every passenger, neatly writing down their names and origins in neat (though barely legible) handwriting on little cardboard cards, which were diligently stored by their thousands in little cabinets in a little office somewhere in the basement of the home office.

...from which basement they were removed in 2010 on the authority of Theresa May, and all destroyed. So there are now no records of who arrived, so people living here now can't prove when and whence they arrived, so they can't prove that they arrived legally and that they have a right to remain. So, no Papers.

Who's in trouble?

Nobody. What is this, the 1990s? Politicians are no longer held accountable for their departments.

In theory, the two main culprits here are Theresa May and Amber Rudd. May's culpability is threefold: she was the Home Secretary who destroyed the landing cards; she was the Home Secretary who cracked down on immigrants; and she's currently, at least in theory, the Prime Minister and, hypothetically, responsible for running the country. Rudd's culpability is the fact she's currently the Home Secretary.

May argues:- it was Labour who suggested destroying old paper documents, and although the decision to destroy these documents in particular was made under her watch, she didn't make it herself. What do you think she was, some sort of government officer? No, she's a politician, and all decisions are taken by officials, so it's not her fault. - everyone hates immigrants, so what's wrong with cracking down on them? Obviously nobody ever intended that NICE immigrants would be caught up in that - that's the fault of officials failing to carry out her obvious wishes only to harrass Evil Immigrants.- oh, so you want to be PM, do you? Please, please, you're welcome to it. Anyone? Anyone at all? Any takers?

Wow, that's horrible. And thank you for the explainer, Sal - I had seen people talking about how horrible this whole thing is in various places on the internet, but they were usually too busy pointing out that it is horrible to explain what exactly happened. Wow.

they were usually too busy pointing out that it is horrible to explain what exactly happened.

Pffft, people don't need facts, they just need to be outraged about a nebulously-defined situation that's terrible, I swear, and you should really do something about and get upset over!

Seriously, though, that sounds like a pretty awful situation. What was the logic behind destroying the landing cards? Just the belief that they weren't needed anymore? Seems like a valuable source of information even beyond the government. (there's tons of useful genealogical and demographic info you can get from records like that!)

_________________I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

[Seriously, though, that sounds like a pretty awful situation. What was the logic behind destroying the landing cards? Just the belief that they weren't needed anymore? Seems like a valuable source of information even beyond the government. (there's tons of useful genealogical and demographic info you can get from records like that!)

Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pmPosts: 3197Location: One of the dark places of the world

alynnidalar wrote:

What was the logic behind destroying the landing cards? Just the belief that they weren't needed anymore?

Pretty much, yes. It seems there was a confluence of three impulses:

a) we don't need paper and cardboard anymore, because we have the internet. Anything that was important would already have been uploaded - so either it's uploaded and we don't need the original, or it wasn't uploaded because who cares? [to be fair, landing card information would generally be of little government interest now, because most immigrants have other sources of data, like visa applications, citizenship applications. It's just that this particular situation happens to be a giant loophole that people seemingly didn't spot at the time, where there's tens of thousands of people who have no other proof of entry]

b) we're broke and we need to save money. Do we really need to spend money maintaining these cardboard boxes?

c) Data Protection. You can't just go around holding onto information about people because it's interesting, when you've got no legitimate reason for having it (unless the people are muslims, obviously, or unless you're an internet company). You certainly can't, say, hand over the cards to a museum, without asking the permission of everybody documented on the cards, which would be a massive pain. Generally the rule is you destroy data once you've used it, and these cards were 'used' decades ago.

Basically, you're right that if we'd held onto the cards until everybody was dead, they'd have been a fantastic archive of information about British history. But, that would have cost money and nobody would have thanked the government with any extra votes for doing so. Nobody even noticed them being destroyed, at the time.

...and as it turns out the irrelevent information on them may actually have been vitally important for some people, but nobody realised that at the time. I think the events are so long ago that people didn't consider the ongoing relevence - I guess they assumed that all these people had died, or gone back, or had later on gained full british citizenship (which, to be fair, most did). And because the decision was taken before the immigration crackdown, even if anyone had realised that there would still be some people in indefinite leave to remain status, it wouldn't have seemed important, because back then nobody was being asked to provide papers proving their date of entry as a child 70 years ago...

[needless to say, we can probably assume that very few people this effects would have come anywhere near the decision-making process, so nobody was in a position to say 'wait, hang on, what about...?' - there aren't a lot of black tory MPs, and even fewer black civil servants]

Or, as the Home Secretary has put it: it's all the fault of the officials, because they are 'too concerned with policy and strategy' - not mentioning that their entire job is to carry out the policies she tells them to carry out, and that if they did otherwise she would fire them.

[On the other hand: the guy leading the clamour against this is the Labour MP, David Lammy. I'm not, in general, a fan - he tends to be a bit knee-jerk and conservative imo (violent video games, bring back beatings, etc), and a little full of himself. But he's also one of the few prominent black politicians, and to be fair to him he's done a good job putting issues affecting poor and minority people into the public limelight. He was also a significant figure in the Grenfell arguments (a friend of his died in the fire), and he's currently making a lot of noise about the recent spate of stabbings in London (he's MP for Tottenham, one of the more troubled areas). Admittedly, he's doing it by complaining about those darned east europeans coming over here and corrupting our youth, but at least he's talking about it. He was once tipped as a future Labour leader, and I wouldn't be surprised if he comes back into contention someday.]

Perhaps May knew that if they were conveniently gone, it'd be a lot easier to get rid of the Windfall generation in the future. Unless that's too cynical, even for her.

Curiously, destroying evidence seems to be policy. If a parent is 'settled' in the UK when someone is born in the UK, which for non-EEA citizens means having 'indefinite leave to remain' (ILR), the person is born British. However, the evidence for recently acquired ILR is a 'biometric residence permit' (BRP). If the parent becomes British, the BRP has to be surrendered to the Home Office, which leaves the child with no evidence that a parent was 'settled' when the child was born! (A current British passport is not always sufficient evidence when renewing a passport, for too many have been issued without proper checking.) It's as though the children are stripped of British nationality when their parents naturalise as British!

In general, immigration records are destroyed after 15 years of inactivity. That too may cause problems for those whose primary evidence of ILR is a stamp in their passport; ink stamps from Heathrow were stolen and seem to have been used to provide fake evidence of having the right to work.

The alternative explanation for the problem with BRPs is that the government has not been cancelling BRPs as people have naturalised or, more rationally, if they were subsequently stripped of British citizenship, with the result that when one person was stripped of British citizenship, which does not revive any previous leave to remain, he was able use his old, unexpired BRP to re-enter the country to appeal against his being deprived of British citizenship in person. (HMG practice when revoking someone's citizenship because so doing seems conducive to the public good is to wait until the person has gone abroad; the person then cannot return to the UK to argue his case.) As the first British passport can take a long time, there have been many cases of newly naturalised citizens returning to the UK using their now inappropriate BRPs. In law, the only valid evidence of British citizenship at a British port is a British passport or a 'certificate of right of abode' entered in a current, non-British passport; a certificate of naturalisation is not valid for this purpose.

A slightly less jaundiced view is that this is part of a policy to ensure integration. As personal documents are lost over the generations, proving that one is British will come to depend on tracing one's descent to someone born in the UK before 1983.

Now, Labour is not innocent in all this. First of all, the decision to destroy the cards appears to have been taken in 2009, during the last Labour government. They had a declared policy that all resident non-citizens would have to have biometric residence permits, and had introduced so far optional ID cards for British citizens. (I think resident British citizens had a right to an ID card: British citizens do not have a right to a British passport. It may be refused if HMG sees fit.) Secondly, there appeared to be a very real possibility under a 2009 act that holders of ILR who did not meet the qualifications for 'candidate citizenship' or the new 'permanent residence' would lose their right to remain.

Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pmPosts: 3197Location: One of the dark places of the world

So, what's going on with Brexit?

As we've covered previously, there is a small logical flaw in the idea of Brexit: the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.- all parties have agreed there cannot be a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, for political-military reasons- there cannot be a hard border between Northern Ireland and Britain, because the DUP won't allow it and the government will collapse- there cannot be a hard border between Britain and the outside world, because post-Brexit we'll be dependent on foreign trade- there must be a hard border somewhere between Ireland (i.e. the EU) and the ouside world, because otherwise the EU's customs union won't work- specifically, there probably must be a hard border between Britain and the EU, because otherwise the Brexiteer's immigration controls won't work.

(it's worth pointing out also that although it's the Irish border that's most important, because of the peace process, the same problems occur with all other borders with the EU, in terms of the damaging effects on the local economies)

So we have a (n entirely predictable) crisis.

There have been two main solutions to this crisis proposed.

1: The Prime Minister favours something we're calling a customs partnership. In essence, Britain would keep a hard border with the outside world, on behalf of the EU, but give compensation to people who aren't actually trying to get to the EU. More specifically: the UK would levy EU customs (as well as its own) on imports into the UK, on the assumption that they're destined for the EU, but if it can be shown that good aren't destined for the EU. The UK would then give the money to the EU.

This option has the advantage of ensuring that there's no hard border with Ireland, at least for goods (this won't stop migration, so presumably the assumption will have to be just that the local police will work harder to find illegal immigrants once they're in the EUK). But it will obviously make trade with the outside world more difficult: companies trading with the UK will have to be willing to pay full EU customs and hope to receive their refund when they show they're only shipping to the UK. And that will be a lot of paperwork, because it's not entirely clear how you'd be able to prove that your goods ended up in the UK, rather than being moved on to the EU (if there's no UK-EU border). And this all relies on the EU being happy to have a free-trade agreement with the UK on terms that Brexiteers agree with - it would probably have to mean UK products would need to abide by EU regulations, for instance, while the UK would have to accept EU products even if they didn't comply with UK regulations.

So, it's controversial. The foreign secretary has described the plan as "crazy", and the Brexist secretary has described the plan as "illegal". Prominent Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg has described the PM's proposal as "completely cretinous". The EU has described the plan as "magical thinking". So...

2. The Brexiteers prefer a plan being called Max-Fac (annoyingly, because 'maxi-fac' would sound much better). This is short for 'maximum facilitation'. The idea here is that there both is and isn't a border: there's a border, which is hard enough to do everything required of it, between the UK and Ireland, but at the same time nobody notices the border. This has several requirements: the EU must allow UK goods to travel through the EU without being charged customs; the EU must allow a waiver so that UK citizens don't have to make customs declarations at borders (and likewise the UK with EU citizens); the EU must agree to allow individuals and small businesses to be exempt from customs; the EU must agree to create a class of designated smugglers trusted traders who are not subject to customs checks (to allow locals to cross and recross the border without being stopped). And, most importantly, we will use something called "technology", which will solve any problems that might emerge. The problem of ascertaining trusted trader status, for instance, will be solved by technology: flawless number-plate readers will correlate number-plates with entries in a database showing an individual's status - in real time, with no delay, with no need for human border guards. Likewise, technology will prevent smuggling or illegal migration, and will determine which vehicles carry goods for the UK or EU and which carry goods meant to be exported on to third-party countries. And technology will determine whether the goods in a vehicle are compliant with EU regulations when UK regulations have diverged.

Unfortunately this solution is not without its own complication. For one thing, it relies on massive and expensive co-operation from the EU. For another, it still creates border infrastructure, even if it's unmanned, which could be a target for both protests and attacks (most of the 200 crossing points are in constituencies represented by Sinn Fein). Some of the technology required - like keeping a database of every time a Northern Irish citizen's car crosses into Ireland, or compulsory GPS tracking devices on all large vehicles - may prove politically incendiary in the North. And much of the technology required either a) hasn't been detailed, b) has been detailed but doesn't actually exist, or c) does exist in theory, but would take vast expense of time and resources to actually implement everywhere along the border.

As a result, this plan is also controversial, particularly with the EU, who describe this too as "magical thinking". The main opposition party in Ireland has already promised to reject it.

So....

3. With Brexiteers seemingly getting the upper hand in pushing max-fac (which the EU probably won't accept), May has taken the extraordinary step of dividing her cabinet into two working parties to go away and think seriously about how rubbish both options are (normally this sort of thing would be done by civil servants, who present the facts to ministers, who decide which option to choose - but now the facts are determined by political allegiance). To block the brexiteers, she's reportedly been pushing a third option, that eliminates the problems of the first two solutions. The third option is what's called a time-limited goods arrangement. Under this plan, Britain would of course immediately leave the customs union, but wouldn't have a hard border with the EU. Instead, there would be a hard border with the outside world, and Britain would commit to obeying EU regulations and tarriffs. This would appear to avoid all the problems of Brexit entirely, while still delivering Brexit. However, some Brexiteers complain that this is literally just doing exactly what we've been doing until now, only calling it "Brexit". To assuage them, the arrangement is time-limited: it will end at some point. It's not clear what that point would be, and it may be that it'll be left indefinite. But it'll absolutely happen someday, so this is only a transitional agreement, so Brexit will absolutely have been delivered. Remainers will thus be able to claim that we've Remained, while Hard Brexiteers will be able to claim we have a Hard Brexit that's temporarily being delayed while we implement the necessary technological infrastructure.

How was the Irish border handled before the EU? If the border was unmanned back then, surely there were the exact same problems (a person or goods could get themselves into Ireland and then quite easily get into the UK).

_________________I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

_________________ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!kårroť

Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pmPosts: 3197Location: One of the dark places of the world

alynnidalar wrote:

How was the Irish border handled before the EU? If the border was unmanned back then, surely there were the exact same problems (a person or goods could get themselves into Ireland and then quite easily get into the UK).

Traditionally, the border was handled through the medium of a bloody guerilla war that killed thousands of people (something like 3% of the population were directly physically injured by the Troubles, and around 0.3% were murdered (not counting the background rate, which naturally increased as the police became ineffective and large areas came to be ruled by a variety of paramilitary mobs and drug cartels)). [for context, while only a few thousand died, per capita that's something like three times bloodier than the Mexican drug war has been so far, although of course the Troubles lasted longer]

This has come to be seen as an inefficient approach to the issue, so it's hoped that some alternative can be found.

Sarcasm aside: the difference is, back then there WAS a hard border, and theoretically we could return to that now. But nobody wants to return to a hard border because:

a) most people don't want a return to violence. And British politicians don't want to sign the death warrants of the people sent to guard the border crossingsb) Sinn Fein are now the biggest party in northern ireland, and they represent the border seats, and they're dead (no pun intended) against a hard border. Nobody wants to be seen to be visibly ignoring the democratic will of the people, and nobody wants Sinn Fein to decide there's no point pursuing their goals through democratic means. [the North will be majority Catholic within a generation]c) Because we've had two decades of peace and cross-border contact, the economy is now much more interwoven with that of the south than before. The old border prevented people getting jobs, but since they were hypothetical jobs, nobody knew about it. The new border would actually make people lose their real, existing jobs, and while that's economically equivalent, it gets people a lot more pissed off. d) more generally, NI is poor, and a return to the hard border would continue to make it poorer and poorer (the province is essentially under siege, between Ireland and the sea)

Also, politically, e) before the EU, the UK and Ireland could bilaterally negotiate border protocols. Now, that's not possible - any negotiations need to be with the whole of the EU, because it'll be the EU's border. That will make the situation much less flexible, which encourages people to try to get things in stone now, rather than being able to rely on bullying Ireland to do whatever we think is favourable to us in the future.and f) because Westminster is unusually closely balanced at the moment, the voices of NI parties are more powerful than they ever were before. At present, the government only exists because of the support of the DUP, who, while not being as ideological about ties with Ireland as Sinn Fein are, nonetheless don't want a hard border that their voters would see as creating a poverty-perpetuating embargo around the province, and that would alienate pro-Remain voters (who were the vast majority in NI, in both communities).

Raphael: ha! A pop culture reference I actually get![I can even nod knowingly and note that he used the extended album version, rather than the abbreviated original radio version...][

Welp, so much for my suggestion that we draw inspiration from history, then.

_________________I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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